Thursday, December 4, 2014

Welcome to the world of DIY success: Life beyond your degree

In a manner totally unprecedented
for undeclared college sophomores, today I questioned what I am doing with my
life. While meeting with a teacher about a research paper I had written for a
class, my professor, who I respect greatly, asked me what I want to do after
graduation.

Ohhhhhh, this question.

I don’t know, not end up
homeless or back in my parents’ house? Find a partner who thinks I have an
above average sense of humor and butt and maybe settle down? Go to grad school
so that even if I do end up homeless and alone people at least have to refer to
me as Doctor? I’m cautious in what I ask for from the world, but I’d take any
of the above.

Upon telling him that I want to work in public health and hopefully help resolve global healthcare
inequality (okay, I’m not actually that cautious), my professor encouraged me
and added seriously that I should consider doing something that involves
writing “because I’m a great writer.” And that was the onset of my existential
crisis.

If you asked me what my dream
job is, I’d tell you instantaneously that I would love to write political speeches
for the president of the United States while also maintaining a successful side
career of food and lifestyle blogging while still finding time to travel the
world with my two lovely children who have interesting but not unspellable
names. I’d also eventually publish a bestselling non-fiction book about my intriguing
life experiences and look fantastic at my book signings with my lovely, photogenic family and still above average butt.

Writing is part of the dream. It
always has been. I was the type of kid who kept a journal, wrote really awful
song lyrics about my middle school traumas, and secretly enjoyed writing bad
poetry about all the life experience I thought I had. I still am that type of
kid. For me, writing is something I find solace and freedom in: it connects me
to others while also providing me great comfort when I am just by myself.
Though I don’t struggle with communicating my feelings verbally, it is in long
winding sentences and an abuse of parentheses (not even a little bit apologetic
about it) that I find mental clarity.

So today, like so many other days,
I have found myself asking why I am not majoring in something that has to do
with writing. Why, if I put off writing essays by writing poems (and currently
this blog post) instead, do I not just major in creative writing, or English,
or journalism?

With the advent of the great and
powerful Google, my generation has awkwardly stumbled upon the age of Do It
Yourself “DIY” success. More and more frequently we hear stories of people who
taught themselves the skills that ended up making them successful, couldn’t
survive college but ended up founding the world’s biggest companies, and even
young kids who have already googled their way into mastering skills that most
people don’t even have the chance to learn until college and are now making
more money than many of my twenty-something, employed colleagues. The path to
success is no longer as simple as fulfilling your major requirements: it is a
DIY conglomeration of google searches, good luck, and some innate talent. And
more so than for most things I can think of, for writing this holds
particularly true.

The best writers are not the
ones who are best at writing. As I unfortunately learned while writing essays
on books I hadn’t read in high school, the best prose is not what we reward
writers for, but rather the best ideas. The books we cherish, the ones we fall
in love with and dog-ear the pages of so aggressively that the friends we pass
them onto wonder what’s wrong with us, are not simply the ones written the most
eloquently, but the ones that use good enough writing to convey better than
good enough thoughts. Writers today are not made in writing classrooms, they
are created in the random, marvelous, and sometimes horrifying world we live
in.

As
I often do when I’m feeling discouraged or stressed about my future, I read
Marina Keegan’s “The Opposite of Loneliness,” one of my favorite pieces of
writing, and was reminded that the essays, articles, and books that speak to me
are the ones that help me understand myself and the world around me, not the
ones that tell me things I already know in sing-songy, perfectly punctuated language.
Good writers aren’t good because they know how to use commas, they’re good
because they see questions that they must answer, and they live lives that give
them something to say.

I want something to say. Even if
I end up alone on an inflatable mattress, thirty years from now I want to be so
amazed, outraged, or inspired by the things I’ve observed and learned that I
have no choice but to write about them. I want to be able to tell people how
I helped others understand that the opportunity for wellbeing is a fundamental
human right and how I helped shrink inequality in healthcare access, or maybe
that I didn’t and that it’s still up to others to do what I couldn’t. I want to
be able to write about the people I met who inspired me to keep going and the
experiences I had that made me think I couldn’t go further. I want to care
about something so much and be so involved in something that not writing is not
an option, even though I will never have learned how to do it “correctly.”

Today, during a crisis that I
will not be the last college kid to have, I remembered that college is about
acquiring experiences and interests, not just degrees. I’m going to sit through
boring statistics and applied math classes for the next two years and diligently
work my way through public health school so that I can pursue something that
gets me so excited it keeps me up at night. I’m going to be a public health
worker because I’ll have the skills and experiences that allow me to make a
difference in the world of healthcare.

But
I will be a writer because I will continue to write. Because when I have
questions about the world, I can’t rest until those questions have answers, and
until I have written out those answers. I’ll be a writer because the most used
app on my iphone is the notes app because I spend half my time writing down things
I think sound clever. I’m going to be a writer because even though I’m not
making the decision to pursue a writing degree, I’m making the decision to
pursue a life I’m excited about living. Someday I hope I will have lived the
type of life that’s worth sharing with others, but until then, my anxious
college self will be pursuing a quantitative degree and amateur blogging my way
to happiness.

There are many ways to DIY
yourself to success. For writers, for engineers, and for everyone, the
unknowns and the uncertainties are not problems, they’re part of the process.
Have faith in the path you’re on, and pursue a good life, not a good degree. Wherever
we’re going and whatever our path looks like, we’ll get there when we get
there. In the meantime all we can do is just keep our heads down, work hard,
and not forget to love the life we’re living.

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Welcome!

I'm Kristen - a nineteen year old wannabe blogger with lots to say about not much at all. I'm currently going to school in Georgia and constantly longing for the smell of pine trees. I love tea, fuzzy socks, amateur poetry, and eating at restaurants that try to be hip. These are my musings about my life and the world around me. Thanks for stopping by!